How to Invest in Artificial Intelligence — The Motley Fool

There’s a lot of potential for investors in the artificial intelligence (AI) market. A myriad of companies — like NVIDIA Corporation(NASDAQ:NVDA) and Alphabet‘s (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google — are betting on a variety of AI segments including data processing, deep learning, machine learning, driverless cars, etc. that all contribute to AI’s growing market potential — which is estimated to be worth $46 billion in just three years.

So let’s take a quick look at few things investors should know about AI, including some key areas to invest, which companies are leading in the space, and why you should take the longview with any AI investment you make.

Image source: Getty Images.

Determine which industry to invest in

Artificial intelligence can seem like a very abstract idea to a lot of people, so let’s demystify it just a bit. If you’ve ever tagged a friend in a Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) photo or asked Siri or Amazon.com‘s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Alexa a question, then you’ve interacted with a type of AI technology.

Facebook uses its own AI to help recognize photos of your friends and to figure out the context of your text and even video posts. Facebook uses AI to both deliver the most relevant (or what it thinks are the most relevant) posts in your Newsfeed and also police offensive content.

Amazon not only uses AI for it Alexa-powered devices like the Echo, but also for its lucrative Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing unit. The company has added machine learning services — a type of artificial intelligence that allows programs to learn based on past information — to AWS, including natural language processing, speech generation, and image analysis.

Those are a few examples of AI being used in software, but AI investments aren’t just relegated to that segment. Investors can also bet on more tangible (literally) investments like graphics processors. NVIDIA’s graphics processing…